Tabriz to Qazvin and a broken camera

Playing catch up with the blog here. I made it down from Tabriz to Qazvin in the four days. Mountains gave way to fertile plains but alas, I can't show any of this as my camera broke whilst taking a photo of an orchard. Slipped from my grasp and whilst the strap stopped it plummeting to its doom the iris got jarred and FUBARed! Still, imagine all those mountain types areas I posted so many pictures of in Turkey gradually giving way to autumnal looking orchards then broad valleys which soon begin to look quite Middle Eastern albeit with more greenery than you might expect if you'd not been in this part of the world before.

Reached Qazvin after an heroic mornings cycling which saw me put 80 miles on the clock before 1 in the afternoon. Turning down the endless tea and food invites helped it has to be said. Oh, and one invitation to drink alcohol at 10AM. Little bit early that. So, I hit Qazvin ready to get my camera repaired or replaced in the afternoon. Not realizing that it was a public holiday and everywhere was shut. Ah. Bugger.

So it was early the next morning before I found a camera repair place nearby. Too early in fact and I had to wait for a bit until the right person turned up. He took the camera off me, told me it was a problem with the iris (which was good, until then I thought it was a problem with the light sensor) and said to come back in an hour. Which I did, only to be told that it was not fixable and I should get it sorted when I got back to Englistan. Damn, bugger and blast. Spent the rest of the day comparing the options available for me to get a replacement and finally settled on the Canon SX200. Expensive at 300 Euros but a good replacement. I went and changed the money, then returned to the camera shop, which was in the same arcade as the repair place. As I did so one of the chaps from the repair place waved me back into the shop... Mr Talib had arrived, the wizard of camera repairers and would be able to fix me camera! I was to give the camera to him, sit down and wait which I duly did.

In the end it took three hours for Mr Talib to strip my camera down and rebuild the iris by hand. In Europe I've no doubt it would've taken a couple of weeks of sending it to a lab and During this time I took a series of photos using my phone entitled "Your warranty is now well and truly voided" and was plied with copious amounts of tea, bread, cucumbers, tomatos and feta. When I find a way to transfer them I'll upload them to the webs. In the meantime here's the chaps after they fixed my camera.